OK—so we have to understand that being first in the tech industry isn’t what is important. Often first movers get overtaken by second movers who go on to rise to power—e.g. AltaVista, Friendster, etc. Being early is important, but being first isn’t necessarily enough.
This is a pretty well-established pattern. So, yes, strictly it is “early movers” that the discussion should be about. We could discuss “first movers”—but that fails to nail the main phenomenon of interest here very well, IMO.
There’s something more basic about the analogy I object to. Google, Friendster, Altavista and Facebook were not founded at the beginning of a singularity.
It seems that:
The first creatures to develop human-level intelligence came to dominate all other creatures.
The first humans to develop agriculture did not come to dominate all other humans
I don’t know how to interpret the evidence from the industrial revolution, and I don’t really see a pattern. But I think the place to look for a pattern is here, not in recent tech industry history.
The first creatures to develop human-level intelligence came to dominate all other creatures.
I am not so confident of this. There were a bunch of early hominids, other than H. Sap, whose intelligence is not well established. Suppose, say, it turns out that Neanderthals were 7% smarter on average than modern humans, but lost out evolutionarily because they had too much body hair. What would that imply about the importance of intelligence?
Actually, we have strong reason to suspect Neanderthals were smarter than Cro-Magnon man, and lost out because Cro-Magnon man traded and Neanderthals didn’t.
There’s something more basic about the analogy I object to. Google, Friendster, Altavista and Facebook were not founded at the beginning of a singularity.
What do you mean by that? You think Google isn’t going to go on to develop machine intelligence? Surely they are among the front runners—though admittedly there are some other players in the game. This is not a case of hanging around for some future event.
The first creatures to develop human-level intelligence came to dominate all other creatures.
The first humans to develop agriculture did not come to dominate all other humans
The wording of the question was:
Compared to the farming and industrial revolutions, intelligence explosion first-movers will quickly control a much larger fraction of their new world.
It doesn’t say the control is kept indefinitely. So—for instance—Sergey and Larry might die—but they will still have quickly come to control a larger fraction of the world than any farmer or industrialist.
But Google and Facebook are hardly “first movers” at the scale you’re talking about.
OK—so we have to understand that being first in the tech industry isn’t what is important. Often first movers get overtaken by second movers who go on to rise to power—e.g. AltaVista, Friendster, etc. Being early is important, but being first isn’t necessarily enough.
This is a pretty well-established pattern. So, yes, strictly it is “early movers” that the discussion should be about. We could discuss “first movers”—but that fails to nail the main phenomenon of interest here very well, IMO.
There’s something more basic about the analogy I object to. Google, Friendster, Altavista and Facebook were not founded at the beginning of a singularity.
It seems that:
The first creatures to develop human-level intelligence came to dominate all other creatures.
The first humans to develop agriculture did not come to dominate all other humans
I don’t know how to interpret the evidence from the industrial revolution, and I don’t really see a pattern. But I think the place to look for a pattern is here, not in recent tech industry history.
I am not so confident of this. There were a bunch of early hominids, other than H. Sap, whose intelligence is not well established. Suppose, say, it turns out that Neanderthals were 7% smarter on average than modern humans, but lost out evolutionarily because they had too much body hair. What would that imply about the importance of intelligence?
Actually, we have strong reason to suspect Neanderthals were smarter than Cro-Magnon man, and lost out because Cro-Magnon man traded and Neanderthals didn’t.
What do you mean by that? You think Google isn’t going to go on to develop machine intelligence? Surely they are among the front runners—though admittedly there are some other players in the game. This is not a case of hanging around for some future event.
The wording of the question was:
It doesn’t say the control is kept indefinitely. So—for instance—Sergey and Larry might die—but they will still have quickly come to control a larger fraction of the world than any farmer or industrialist.